White Denim: Saturday, Oct. 29

Out of the trailer, into the fire.

[EVOLVING ROCK] For Josh Block, drummer for Austin’s White
Denim, describing the process of recording the band’s new album is a
bit difficult. It probably shouldn’t be; it wasn’t, as they say, his
first rodeo. In fact, D, which came out in May, is the
genre-hopscotching group’s third record. As far as the band’s concerned,
however, it might as well be its debut. It’s the first album White
Denim worked on outside of the trailer it uses as a combination studio
and practice space. It was a new experience that changed the way the
band thinks about making music.

So, when asked to discuss this record in relation to those that came before it, Block defers to a metaphor.

“Last
night, this girl at dinner was talking to her friend who was taking a
picture on Instagram,” he says over the phone while on break from
rehearsals, a day before the band leaves on tour with Manchester
Orchestra. “The girl was talking about photography and saying, ‘I don’t
use that stuff,’ referring to digital processing. She seemed put off by
it, and she had sound reasons.” Her argument, he explains, is that she
objected to people being able to essentially manufacture accidents—to
make a photo look like the product of the moment it was taken when it
was actually manipulated after the fact. And that’s what Block considers
White Denim’s earlier albums to be: exercises in faux-spontaneity. “We
did a really good job of making them seem like accidents,” he says.

Listening to D,
the difference is clear. It feels meticulously crafted, and largely for
the better. White Denim’s 2009 breakthrough, the aptly named Fits,
was a frantic, schizophrenic record; the sound of Southern garage punk,
psychedelic rock, prog and free jazz tossed into a blender and set on
puree for an hour. While D maintains that jittery restlessness,
it’s mostly under the surface. Instead of blitzing from one style and
time signature to the next—usually in the span of a single verse—the
band relaxes enough to allow its gorgeously sprawling, swirling songs to
fully unravel. It’s still stylistically manic, but the shifts are more
coherent, skipping from the desert-fried Grateful Dead of the Meat
Puppets’ Up on the Sun (“It’s Him!”) to the twinkling cosmos-folk
of early My Morning Jacket (“Street Joy”) to rollicking, hooky rock ’n’
roll (“Bess St.”).

“We used to just
approach everything as it came and hit every idea and let the album
itself decide how it was going to come out,” Block says. “With this one,
there was a lot more planning. It was more of a traditional approach.”

Along with the
addition of guitarist Austin Jenkins, who joins Block, singer-guitarist
James Petralli and bassist Steve Terebecki, D is not just a new album but the start of a new band—one that no longer has to record in a trailer, at least.

“Everyone has grown
as a player and a person,” he says. “I think those times, as great as
they were, are behind us—which isn’t a bad thing.”